On the Other Side of the Yankee Girl Drawl
The camera is slow.
The screen.
A girl walks out of the shower.
She steps carefully into the shallow,
and wraps herself in an exhausted towel.
Her hands probe at the damp cushion of fat
belonging to her stomach.
She moves the towel onto her thighs
and soon her ankles,
hastily like a failed meditation.
Looks in the mirror and gives the fleshy outline
of her torso
a soft pinch, like teasing a toddler’s cheeks.
On the girl’s chest is what she regards,
the opposite of a bruise,
a ring of blemish
with redness that surfaces from an internal heat.
This is the type of hurt with an energy.
We meet her cerebrally.
This is it.
Fibers of a woman in the making
as I take my palms
and dig as if there is a story to find,
into a greased scalp of hair that flakes though
it doesn’t fail to mold
with sweaty oil making a waxed frame.
I push it and it stays,
holds at a frozen incline
like a breath without a second half.
I’m damn pissed.
You cut the encore! when there isn’t one to begin with.
I pinch an unsatiated gasp
like tying an inhale too tight with string.
Hollow lungs and
cool
like snippets of mint
or a dusty tabloid
lamenting a moment in time
but missing.
I step in the shallow backwards.
There’s a reason why they call these flyaways.
I push my torso over the sink and crowd
my face into the vanity mirror,
big-eyed and looking up
at the stubby rays of a sun.
I was Icarus except I was told to be closer.
I was Icarus who was born my women.
What are they reaching for, 妈妈?
To see the rest of you, I guess. To see the world.
It’s like they’re dancing.
I don’t think they’ve learned the rules.
I thought the laughter was supposed to be light
but nothing melted but the music.
The scene switches.
The girl is dressed in weighted clothes
that feel of a bodybag not yet employed.
Thumbs the frayed bristles of her toothbrush,
thinking, and, as she brushes the grooves of her molars,
blood runs.
A nameless tension settles on her back and hips,
pulsing like a sore dance.
Dinner at Ice Age
Why don’t you join us for the hunt?
A wholesale woman.
A bag of dried prunes.
I flip on my shades at the dawn of my massacre.
A sandal, mouth popped open.
I am too selfish to hunt anyone besides myself.
I could be that Rae Dunn bitch sleeping within white pickets
without a single bloody thing at the points.
Grinding my teeth.
A pitchfork for a roast.
A braked-wheel ripple across my temples.
A gospel.
Unhinge each of my tendons after Sunday.
Two coupons.
Pierce my heart chamber.
Free drink.
One coupon.
Lick my heartbeats off the rod because
the rhythm
is the only thing left of me.
Daydreams Are for Counting
The bottleshop at the threshold of town
squats like a teal-painted barn
for if the town was just a prairie,
and at that barn would sit a little lamb
on one of the parking stumps,
in front of which a car would normally face
and be relieved that, now, it can look nowhere.
The lamb sits with the mufflers still hot
and spectates the fuel stations just to the left
and the tiny daisies
salvaged as a favor by the crawling spring.
The uncomfortable summer wind crayons her fleece
with a rush and then a slow morale.
At the bottleshop barn, nothing is made secret.
The snarky, bubble-retro hang signs
that can take up the width of a door
with just a word.
Beer. Lottery. Soda. Smokes.
because, as everyone knows,
the best service is being able to tell something
like you know it for sure.
Little Lamb tips the cream soda can
towards her cupid’s bow and
picks up the pink kitchen grease
long melting on her upper lip.
Her tired eyes and the sun.
Little Lamb would be allowed to daydream.
On the dusty freeway ride last week,
she sat with the air in the vehicle dry
with a blank dreariness.
Out the mud-spotted window,
she catches a glimpse of a burial site,
sprinkled with yellow and pink petals
like fallen letters.
Next to it, a seasonal berry stand.
She comes home on some days and washes her face
with just the warm tap and waits for the scrubby
redness on her cheekbones to subside.
Little Lamb walked in yesterday to the bagel shop
that, no matter when, is always busy
being filled with goth white people
wearing authentically-faded tees and
septum piercings clogged with nameless fingerprints.
The nice blonde girl probably with a name
like Sugar or Candy with the nippling tie-dye tank
and just the stoned guy named John.
The pre-job and post-job bustle
off-shelving the sandwiches called something cute like
The Tahoe or The Yuba or The Yosemite
with the pungent sprouts.
The bagel shop that sells the bubble tea
made of colored dust from a pouch,
and amidst all this Little Lamb would think
Maybe I will fly further.
Maybe she will fly further into this
compaction of idiosyncrasies
and, like everyone, be a drifter.
Little Lamb after a shift will palm,
kindly with an ask, a fortune cookie
packed with, not one, but three fortunes
that a machine error pinched in a clump,
leaving even the blank
paper strips with more wordless ridges.
Little Lamb with Sam Phillip’s How To Dream
in her ear like how it sounds in Gilmore Girls.
From her bed, she can see the black tapestry
of mellow-night trees with the tops like a lacy fringe,
like it was meant for a face.
Across the cool window is a faraway house
with a baby lamp still out on its porch.
Little Lamb some mornings would want to lay
with her back on the green
in a type of nirvanic calm that she tells everyone
the jade bangle on her wrist makes possible
when it really is just painted glass.
She would nest her head in the grass until,
if she waited enough years,
the daisies lined the pockets of her jeans and
crept up her sleeves and pant legs until
the daisies are the only things still clinging.
Die in this sunshine.
On signal, she would board the night train.
She elbows her lap,
cream soda can to chest,
her sight in line with the underbelly of the passing,
pollen-streaked trucks.
On the side of the road in front of the bottleshop barn,
Little Lamb recalls what it is like to see movement
from a view of one not moving
but feeling real.
Countertop Film
We meet a woman with the century in its infancy.
The sidewalks where people got high from
the both omnipresent and unsuccumbable hope
of seeing life as a romance.
The parking lots torched with the coast’s relentless sunshine
and whatever there was at the time for people talk the gossip
and drain out the seriousness because, with it,
no one would watch the show.
She giggles.
Presents a stuffed camera at the Walgreens countertop,
her skin tan and optimistically dewey.
The first photos.
The crowd she wanted to be in and the crowd she wanted to watch.
Her eyelids rubbed with a diffused style of eyeshadow
worn first by Hollywood’s marvelous
and then by young women who marvel
at what should comprise a life lived only once.
A PINK tank top.
A high ponytail.
The pieces no one could catch.
The pillowy blue shorts comical enough for her
to feel so undeniably Californian to the point
where cooling herself in an air-conditioned
drugstore was enough to entertain the
mirage of an all-American summer.
The woman blabbers with convinced majesty about
these weightless things, like any storyteller would do,
to write of a lifestyle.
To televise life is to rearrange pathos,
to string fascination to a culture in which we all reside
and which belongs to nobody,
at which everyone can exercise spectator gratitude.
And to own this pathos,
is to foremost own the picturesque comfort of
never thinking too deeply about exactly why it is all beautiful.
Be emotionally separate from the wanting, but want it.
Have it all.
Play tourist in your suburb.
Make your own applause.
Leave Huizhou in pictures.
The watering hole that her older brothers thrown her into
and from which she quenched her thirst.
The peanut barrels from which all the boys and girls
will each pocket half a handful and run run run fast
because they thought that they, and maybe they did,
took all that anyone could want in this world.
The 1980s Panasonic television.
The first Smurfs episode aired in China.
The first dose of the romantic nothingness
that is comfort and the everythingness that is
knowing the wanting has begun.
But today was new.
Today she can keep everything.
妈 Had This Needle
Perhaps the girl makes due with the time been dealt.
She wears her mother’s old buttoned tee and low-rised jeans.
Call it nostalgic and have her
be molded by where a body used to be.
Call it timeless
and have her carve shapeness into where time washed the body out.
Fill it with something more prepared to be alive.
The girl fashions a life from when the world seemed conquerable
to a woman who had not yet been conquered by the world.
The woman once owned a ragdoll that told her
Make sure you stuff me with a cry.
She tosses the needle up into the sky and
watches it fracture into more stars.